Columbus

Quietly exquisite, Columbus is a film of extraordinary grace, serenity, and beauty.  This is the premiere production of a Korean-American director who calls himself Kogonada, the name of one of Kurosawa's screenwriters.  The movie is a perfectly realized homage to Yasujiro Ozu, an exceptionally subtle and moving study of a life-changing friendship.  Few films focus on friendship and I don't know any picture that studies friendship so intensely in the context of architectural modernism on the Indiana prairie.  Columbus feels unique because of its intense invocation of a built environment and its romantically optimistic view of the architect as a sort of Promethean striver whose works shape the lives of those fortunate enough to live among them.  Ultimately, the film is utopian -- great architecture, the picture proclaims, ennobles and, ultimately, saves lives.  It's like William Carlos Williams' assessment of poetry:  the architecture shown in the film does nothing but, yet, every day people perish miserably for want of the qualities embodied in that work. 

Architecture is about space and distance, about the texture of materials and about the organization of light; great architecture sculpts the void between structural elements and changes the quality of the light and shadow that defines a building.  To appreciate this vital aspect of the film, Columbus is a movie that must be seen on a large screen -- the picture is so exceptionally beautiful that the viewer needs to be aware of the highly designed color schemes, the exact nuances of light and darkness, and the director's use of bright highlights within his perfectly designed compositions.  All of this might well be visible on a small screen but it would be "mentioned" as opposed to the way that these effects are dramatized in the movie -- the film is so remarkably designed that you need to see it as it was imagined, on a big screen, and, indeed, with a suitably hushed and awestruck audience.

Columbus is a family melodrama, a story about the conflicts between children and their parents.  It's plot, like the buildings that it shows, is classical and beautifully symmetrical.  A famous Korean architect has come from Seoul with his assistant (and possibly lover) to deliver a lecture in Columbus, Indiana.  For complex reasons, this small Midwestern city is a mecca for modernist art -- there are eight or nine famous builidings in the city, many of them designed by the father and son, Finnish architects, Eilel Saarinen and Eero Saarinen.  (We see local tour guides leading groups of people through these iconic buildings.)  While inspecting one of the city's landmarks, the Miller House (Eero Saarinen), the Korean architect collapses, apparently, the victim of a stroke.  His son, Jin, who is estranged from the great man, arrives in town to attend at his father's sick-bed.  Jin stays at an elegant bed-and-breakfast (the most beautiful bed and breakfast in cinema history) and flirts with his father's assistant (played by Paker Posey).  He meets a local girl, Casey, whose life is stalled-out.  She's 19 or 20, working in a library where her boss -- he has a college degree and lords it over the girl -- implies that he wants to have a romantic relationship with her.  Casey has had some bad trouble in her life -- her mother was a meth addict and the parent-child relationship has been inverted:  Casey has had to care for her mother whose addiction has made her unpredictable and who has a predilection for "shit heads" as boyfriends.  When Casey meets Jin, she impresses him with her knowledge of the city's architectural masterpieces even though Jin denies any interest in the subject.  (In fact, he is very interested.)  Casey escorts Jin to the various modernist monuments in the town and a close, if non-romantic, relationship ensues.  Casey admits to Jin that she has had a difficult adolescence and, in fact, was saved somehow from despair by her contemplation of the wonderful buildings in her environment -- these buildings mean something very profound and heart-felt to her, although the movie has the tact to never exactly explain what this means.  (In one remarkable scene, Jin asks Casey to stop parroting the tour-guide spiel and tell him directly what a building means to her -- the camera switches to a reverse angle and films Casey from inside the modernist masterpiece, a 1956 glass bank, and we see her lips move and her remarkable expressive face congested with emotion, but we can't hear what she says.  In another remarkable scene, Casey confesses to Jin how a building's façade saved her life when her mother was entrapped in her addiction -- we can see the building through the windshield of the car in which Casey is sitting but Kogonada keeps the focus on the girl and not the building so that we don't really see it clearly.  Kogonada knows that just as an architect uses voids as well as form, so there is a power in cinema in withholding things that the audience wants to hear or see.)  In a startling admission, Casey says:  "This town is big on meth and modernism."  One of the big-name architects touring Columbus has recognized Casey's superb eye and deep interest in the buildings and has encouraged her to move to the East Coast and pursue a career in architecture, even offering her an internship in an architectural office, but Casey resists -- it's too easy for her remain in town, particularly since her mother's dependence on her gives her an excuse to not leave Columbus.  The famous Korean architect worsens and Jin astounds Casey by admitting that he hopes his father will die.  Casey's loyalty to her mother is such that this statement shocks her.  After much soul-searching and encouragement from Jin, Casey decides to leave town and pursue a career in architecture.  Jin now is trapped in Columbus -- in a way, he has succeeded to Casey's paralysis, unable to leave the city while his father, with whom he had not exchanged words for more than a year before the old man's stroke, hovers between life and death.  The irony is that the young man who greatly desires to leave Columbus is trapped there; the young woman who desperately wanted to remain in town must leave.  The film ends with 'empty frames' derived from Ozu -- silent corridors in Casey's house, a stormy sky, a bridge against the sky, then, a lower shot of the bridge, now less statuesque, with a car moving toward us with its headlights on as the movie fades to black.  In all respects, this film is almost perfectly realized.  Kogonada understands how to interpose architectural images, cubist thresholds and doorways and corridors shot through telephoto lenses with beautifully framed two-shots showing the principal characters on their wanderings through town.  There are several images of willow trees in a green meadow that are so startlingly beautiful that they take your breath away.  The acting is beyond reproach:  John Cho plays the kind, but sometimes, bitter and angry, Jin -- he's superb.  Haley Lu Richardson acts the part of the fiercely intelligent Casey.  Both she and Jin are expert at showing something that films almost never attempt -- as in Ozu's great movies, the characters can be seen actually thinking; we can sense that they are trying to understand and articulate things and that this takes some effort but is worthwhile.  Beyond the two principals, the other roles are also wonderfully realized.  Despite the movie's use of austere modernist buildings as its backdrop and, indeed, raison d'etre, the film is extremely warm and generous.  The only criticism that can be made of the film is that it is so intensely influenced by Ozu (and to a lesser extent Antonioni) that the movie seems a tiny bit derivative -- there are, maybe, a four or five "empty shots" too many and some of the landscapes are, possibly, unnecessary.  That said, if a film maker is going to influenced by another director it's a wonderful thing that Kogonada has chose Yasujiro Ozu as his master.  This doesn't stop me from wondering what this brilliant director's next film will look like when, I hope, he is a little less heavily indebted to the Japanese master.